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OECD Economics Department Working Papers

Working papers from the Economics Department of the OECD that cover the full range of the Department’s work including the economic situation, policy analysis and projections; fiscal policy, public expenditure and taxation; and structural issues including ageing, growth and productivity, migration, environment, human capital, housing, trade and investment, labour markets, regulatory reform, competition, health, and other issues.

The views expressed in these papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the OECD or of the governments of its member countries.

The Determinants of Exchange Rate Movements

Exchange rates are relative prices of national currencies, and under a floating rate regime they may naturally be viewed as being determined by the interplay of supply and demand in foreign exchange markets. This proposition is uncontroversial, but it provides no more than a starting point for understanding exchange rate determination and its relationship to other macroeconomic variables and to policy. Supply and demand in currency markets are dependent on conditions in other markets, real and financial, which are affected in turn by exchange rates themselves. In fact any analysis which attempted to be general would describe exchange rates as being determined in a complex process of interaction simultaneously with all other variables in the international macro-economy. Such an approach would prove too cumbersome to be helpful empirically. Simplifying assumptions have therefore been used in most standard models to provide explanations which are in varying degrees partial. Each model ...